 thousands, but we haven't really seen a second wave quite yet. I know there's Uber. I know there's, there's, there's other companies Snapchat, but they all kind of seem like they're not really competitors or threats to fang. When does, when does somebody take down? Someone has to do kind of a social networking, but in a way that isn't like everyone else I don't know. Do they though? Like there was no social networking before social networking. Maybe it's something entirely different. Maybe it's a way to make friends online. Like real friends, both online and in real life. Like, like, it'll be like, like, something buddy or, you know, local buddy or something like you just, and it'll be, it'll be like a, it'll be like a stitch in be kind of like thing for the, for the 21st century. There also, I think there has to be a new technology because a lot of the early, a lot of the Googles and Amazons, they took advantage of the web. And then a lot of the twitters and Facebooks, they sort of took advantage of mobile. They took, they started on the web, but they really took advantage of mobile. And so I think, I think there has to be like, what is that next disruptive platform? Is it going to be augmented reality or AI or, you know, whatever it is? The company, because, because the fan companies are getting slow. They don't move fast anymore. They're too big. Well, they, yeah, they compass too much and that kind of success breeds that a little bit. That's why I keep looking at, you know, like bicycle rentals and a, you know, little AI companies. You know what they need is to automate your social network. It's blockchain, says Derek Silva. Might be, might be. Somebody might finally figure out blockchain. No, automation of social networks where you have an avatar and that, no, no, an avatar that does all that thinking for you. You're just holding something on to an exist. That's the mistake of futurist bolting something onto an existing product. It's going to be something totally different. I'm telling you. It's going to be local, buddy. That's now pretty good. Actually, I like that. That has the hallmarks. I'm not saying we're talking to people on the other side of the world. We're not talking to somebody in your neighborhood. We're local, buddy. And it's basically like tie in with travel so that your buddy on the other side of the world can become a local buddy. It could. I was just thinking the starter kit is two soup, empty soup cans with a string and you just kind of stretch it out to where you need it. All right. You guys, Roger, are you ready? Yes. All of us are ready. Are all of you ready? We go. Grace Hoffert has supported independent tech news directly for five years. Be like Grace. Get a commercial-free version of the show and more by becoming a DTS member at patreon.com. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, February 11, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Trank. Sarah Lane was going to be with us, but she got called away. She will be back tomorrow. But Roger and I are going to do our best to help you understand the technology world today. We've got some really interesting topics, including some good healthcare topics to get to. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. RSA's Data Privacy and Security Survey for 2019 found that while people enjoy personalized services, respondents did not want them at the expense of privacy. 17% of respondents viewed tailored advertisements as ethical. That means if you can do the math, that 83% didn't. And 24% said personalization to create tailored news feeds is also ethical. Again, means 76% didn't. Samsung released a teaser for its February 20th unpacked event. The video shows words being folded. And the phrase, the future unfolds, who knows what it could mean. We'll probably get Galaxy S phones. Now we're getting a fold of, they're definitely doing a foldable phone. We'll see it. Who knows when we'll get it, but we'll see it. India's Parliamentary Committee on Information Technology issued a summons to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for February 25th. The CEO did not appear for a meeting with the committee on February 11th. He set representatives, but he didn't appear. The meeting was meant to discuss protecting citizens' rights on social media and online news platforms ahead of the upcoming parliamentary elections. Failure to appear on the 25th by Dorsey could be seen as a breach of parliamentary privilege according to the committee's chairman. So they're trying to get serious to get Jack in the door. And OnePlus says it will show off a prototype of a 5G phone at the Qualcomm booth during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, starting February 25th. Attendees will be able to try a demo of 5G gaming on the prototype. All right. Reddit confirmed a $300 million series D round of funding that valued the company at $3 billion. $150 million of that $300 million new funding came from Chinese company Tencent. And Reddit exploded. Reddit, as majority owned by Condonast, has raised $550 million in funding. So this $300 million round is a big chunk of the funding that's raised over the course of its existence, and it's been around for more than a decade. And $150 million is a big chunk of that funding as well. TechCrunch reported the Tencent investment over the weekend before it was confirmed. And Reddit users posted all kinds of reactions, including some protests, images that a lot of people thought might upset Chinese sensors to kind of stick it to Tencent. Reddit is blocked in China. You can't get it beyond the Great Firewall. And Tencent, just so you know, is also an investor in hundreds of companies outside of China. Tesla, Snapchat are also recipients of funding from Tencent. So the one thing I wanted to do when we brought up this topic, Roger, is point out to people like, hey, you know, it's funny to be like, oh, hey, Tencent, you, because you're a Chinese company contributed to the Great Chinese Firewall and the censorship there, which is true. Tencent isn't the only one. Every Chinese technology company has contributed to that firewall. You can't exist in China without doing that. It is run by the Chinese government, though. It's not run by Tencent. But okay, that's fine. So put some Winnie the Pooh images up, because those were images that had been censored in China last year. Okay, you know, that's fair. That's what Reddit's all about. I'm all for that. But some folks were saying that Tencent, by Reddit taking this money, they're somehow funding the Chinese firewall. Certainly by taking money from any Chinese company anytime, Tesla, Snapchat, or otherwise, you are tangentially sending some kind of return eventually into China. That is true. But Tencent's a multinational company. They have offices in Silicon Valley here in California. They have offices all over the world. They make WeChat. They make television and movies. They do financial investments. And that's the arm. It's a separate arm of the company that is doing the investor investments here that's putting the money into Reddit. So I'm not trying to tell you what to believe one way or the other. If you're mad at Reddit for taking this money, there are reasons to be mad. But I just hope that if you are critical, you have all the information and you're not believing something isn't happening that is. It's in this day and age, it's really, for a lot of people, it's hard to separate the nationality of the company from the company's business. Whether it's Microsoft dominating as like the American imperialist in Europe, taking over operating systems all across Europe, or whatever, there's a kind of a knee-jerk reaction, which isn't, which isn't, most times isn't fair to the company because, as you said, the Tencent needs to operate under Chinese rules because if you didn't, you wouldn't be operating in China. But at the same time, I think, and this isn't a jab at China, but like in countries in general, I think there oftentimes is a desire to kind of plant the flag on companies as an emblem or symbol of the country. You take certain companies with you on your trade mission to whatever part of the world that you're going to, and in certain cases, like for example, the whole Justice Department case against Microsoft, when they said, no, you can't access our Irish servers because they're in Ireland, even though they're Microsoft servers just because we're an American company doesn't mean you get access to that content. But there's a faking in a political circle as well. You're one of us. If you're one of us, you've got to run by our rules. It's like, well, no. Well, and that's also a great example, a great counter example where if you might think, oh, Microsoft is a U.S. company, so they're going to carry out whatever the U.S. government wants, right? That would be the same thing as saying Tencent's a Chinese company, they're going to do whatever the Chinese government wants. And Microsoft didn't. Now, the counter argument to that is China has a lot more influence and control over its companies than the U.S. government does. That doesn't mean they have full control. And the other thing I want to make sure we point out, there's a difference between Huawei, whose founder and CEO has connections to the People's Liberation Army. They may be overstated, but they are definitely connections. So there's a clear line that you could follow there to say, well, maybe he's in close conversation. Tencent isn't like that any more than any other Chinese company. So again, not trying to excuse anything or say there isn't smoke or there isn't fire where you might see smoke, but just the fact that Tencent Ventures is putting money into Reddit doesn't mean anything on its own. You're going to have to find some other connections and facts for it to have any influence. And again, Reddit, owned by Condon, asked majority-owned, Reddit has $400 million of funding from other companies. Even if Tencent wanted to have influence on Reddit, it's not likely they can have a lot of influence anyway. U.S. President Donald Trump is signing the American AI Initiative to Promote Development of Artificial Intelligence in the United States. The plan asks federal agencies to prioritize AI in their budgets. It does not add funding, but it does say, like, bump it up in line, give it some money out of the money you already have. It orders data and processing power to be made available for AI researchers, orders the creation of ethical standards, and encourages cooperation with other countries, although within the protecting the interests of the United States. It also asked agencies to create fellowships and apprenticeships to prepare workers for changes to the job market caused by AI. Now, it's all in the enforcement. It's all in how this gets carried out, whether this actually ends up being a good or a bad initiative. But, Roger, I have to say, these principles are the right principles to put into place, if you ask me. They definitely are, but as with all things, the first step is great, but it's the subsequent steps that you take that determine whether or not what you start out of the gate as holds up. There's no funding, and some of the things are kind of vague, but overall it's a nice sounding piece of policy. But as you said, what does it look like in two years' time? Is there going to be more funding? Is there going to be some sort of locus, like some kind of focus that companies can kind of zero in on? Or is it just going to be just kind of a let's throw everything against the wall and see what sticks? Or is this just, hey, let me write something that everyone's going to be happy about, even though there isn't any kind of real continuing push or drive on that track? So, I mean, it's a great first step. I would like to see the other steps that follow. I think if you go through point by point the potential pitfalls, prioritizing the AI and the budget, where a lot of countries just add funding to support AI, may look at first like a bad idea. If it's actually knocking other priorities off, it could be good for AI, it could be bad for other priorities. That's one of the downfalls. Or saying prioritize it may not actually get the money earmarked because it's not funded. I could see that happening as well. Ordering data and processing power to be made available for researchers, that is almost entirely positive from what I could tell as long as it's done. Creation of ethical standards. Again, this isn't going to make the ethical standards, but getting the government involved in talking with academics about that is good. We need more of that. We've seen other companies call for that. So, this is good for it to continue that effort to create ethical standards around AI, and creating fellowships and apprentices to prepare workers for changes to the market caused by AI is exactly what I think should be done. It's not that AI isn't going to have an effect on the workplace, it is, but it's identifying those areas where it will because it won't affect all areas and figuring out how people make the transition. Again, that might need some funding, but at least beginning to create those things and encouraging those things is a good thing. Again, on the face of it, it sounds great. I would like to see what it looks like in a year or two years to see if this drive continues. All right, IDC put out their numbers for smartphones in China, and as in other analyst reports, Apple's shipments declined. IDC puts the decline at 19.9% in China and Q4, but it rose in the rankings. Apple's now the number four. Xiaomi shipments fell 34.9% and dropped to number five. Overall smartphone shipments in China fell 9.7%. The entire smartphone market in China is cooling off. Huawei bucked the trend and rose 23.3%. Apple and Vivo sort of bunked the trend. Apple rose 1.5%, Vivo 3.1%, respectively. Cannellus estimates came out January 28th and we're pretty much similar to this. We told you about them on Daily Tech News Show back on January 28th. Cannellus showed a larger decline overall. They said it was a 14% decline, whereas IDC is calling it a 9.7% decline in the smartphone market in China. Also, Cannellus showed a slight decline for Oppo instead of a slight rise, which IDC shows. But really, I saw a lot of headlines today saying more bad news for Apple and I wanted to point out to people it's not more bad news. It's the same bad news. It's echoing the same bad news we heard back on January 28th and it's honestly not all that bad news because the market in general is declining and Apple isn't declining as fast as Xiaomi. So there's a tiny bit of good news in there for Apple, I guess. And like we said last time, this is just a broader trend of a market that's matured and consumers don't feel that compelled to upgrade as often as they have maybe in years past. So it's going to take a shift on the business side of how do you develop these products? Do you just want to have a new shiny, bright hardware or do you want to move slowly into services where you can continually sell into it over time instead of people just kind of sitting on what they have? Yeah, and I know it's tempting and it's not wholly unjustified to look at whether China's economy as a whole slowing down is the cause or maybe the trade conflict with the United States is the cause and those do contribute to this. I personally think that the more important thing here is that even without a slowing economy and trade conflicts, China would be saturated. The smartphone markets in Europe and the United States have slowed down too. So really, if you're a smartphone maker, you've got to be looking at India, Sub-Saharan Africa and maybe a few other places to figure out where you want to grow if you want to continue to grow. Apple announced that health records on iPhone will soon allow... I'm sorry, I got ahead of myself. Let's talk Microsoft first. Microsoft published a 42-second video teaser for its press event at Mobile World Congress February 24th. It shows a lot of amorphous blobs and fibers, some of which could be wires or processors, but who knows? What it really does is look like something you might see in VR or maybe AR. And it has everyone assuming it'll have to do with HoloLens too. But you can't tell anything from this video. More indicative is the previously known fact, and we've mentioned this on the show before, that among the speakers at the event is Microsoft technical fellow Alex Kipman, who is involved in HoloLens. So I mean, this video doesn't make me think that that won't happen, but I don't know. Roger, can you tell anything from this growing chords and ice cubes that turn into things that might look like processors? It could pave the way for some sort of... Part of it is I'm looking at where they're going to introduce it, which is Mobile World Congress. So there has to be some mobile smartphone... One would think. I mean, I guess it doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to. It would make more sense if it was, yeah. But it makes sense that if it was some sort of... It could be a HoloLens that connects your smartphone or... Wireless HoloLens. Or a HoloLens that is a smartphone. How awesome would that be? Or like the Oculus Go, right? It's just a self-contained unit. And the melting could be like, hey, we're melting away your previous inhibitions or connections. There are a lot of wires in this thing, for something that should be mobile. They're showing a lot of wires in this video. I know that's parsing it way too close, but I think the upshot is this video doesn't tell you anything. No, it's basically telling you that Microsoft has a press announcement that they're going to do at Bubble World Congress and should probably tune in if you want to... And we already knew that. So it really doesn't have anything to do with the conversation. But I would be very excited to see HoloLens 2 become something different than HoloLens and become not just a developer kit, but something that everybody could get their hands on. So very curious to see. Apple announced, here we go, that health records on iPhone will soon let veterans receive care through the US Veterans Health Administration to view medical records in the app. So if you're a veteran and you're getting your care through the VHA, you'll be able to use an Apple app to see all your medical records, something that not everybody who has insurance can get. This is the first consumer record-sharing platform used by the Veterans Administration, which currently provides service to 9 million veterans in the United States. Fitbit's also working with UnitedHealth to sell to seniors through private Medicare plans in 27 U.S. states. And Apple recently introduced an app for Apple Watch and iOS called a TAIN meant for Aetna members. So if you're an Aetna member, you could get a similar thing. This is all pretty much showing that everybody is getting into the health technology platform slowly because it's such a complex business. But it looks like Apple who has said we want to become a services company and health is one of the sectors we want to move in is following up on what they said they'll do. And I do want to impress upon the audience that this isn't a kind of a business you go into lightly. I mean, there's a lot, a lot of legal liabilities involved with this, especially under HIPAA. And so HIPAA, I should say, HIPAA's the filter I use on my vacuum cleaner. That, you know, this shows that Apple is determined to be in this game, at least in this market, for at least a medium, if not longer term, because you don't make this kind of investment and decide you're later, no, I don't want to be in it anymore. No, you don't. And the flip side of that is once you're entrenched in this industry, I mean, one of the problems with the U.S. health care system is the entrenched insurance companies who have a lot of leverage. Once you're involved in this industry, you've got a nice safe product line that you can rely on. You have a nice safe revenue stream because everybody needs health care. And it's so hard to get in that it's hard, you know, competitors have a harder time going up against you. So when you're looking at that Apple bottom line and you're paying attention to iPhone revenue and things like that, don't forget that this is going to provide them a nice steady stream of revenue. The more types of products like this, they roll out. And if they're successful, like this becomes, you know, it doesn't have to be a knock out of the park kind of business, but they do well in it. They could look at to expand and doing back-end stuff, which is kind of one of the big problems right now with digital records and health care is you're relying on systems or if not a decade old, like even older, and you have all these mismatched things that you're trying to transfer over, they can kind of figure all that out. That would be huge. Well, I mean, that is essentially what they're doing with the VA here. And then, you know, no knock on the VA. You probably have very sub-pinions about the VA, depending on how you deal with them and whether you're a veteran or not. But it's an old institution. It's not new. It's not like cutting edge. It's not a startup. So it's probably not going to be the easiest client to be able to get on a digital platform like this. And if you can figure out that Chinese puzzle, you got the rest of it, I think, pretty well. Maybe that's it. Apple doesn't need to figure out the Chinese puzzle about smartphones because they're going to get all this money from health care. Woo-hoo! And in related news, Fitbit added two new fitness trackers to its website, the Fitbit Inspire and the Inspire HR. These are devices for corporate wellness, health plans and health system partners, not for you the consumer to go by. You can't get them unless you're a big company. Pricing will vary by employer and provider. They don't even put a price on them. Although Fitbit says they'll be inexpensive, but you have to be a company that comes and says, yes, I want to give these to my employees to be able to find out how much it's going to cost you because they're at enterprise rates. The Inspire features basic activity and sleep tracking, supports call and text alerts, offers a monochrome touchscreen water resistance to 50 meters in a five-day battery life, the Inspire HR, which hilariously as an enterprise product makes me think it comes from human resources, adds 24-7 real-time heart rate monitoring and a silicon band. CEO James Park of Fitbit told CNBC that 6.8 million patients, employee and health plan members incorporate Fitbits into wellness programs and company revenue is increasingly tied to business customers. So here is a company that is navigating those difficult waters that we mentioned earlier in a couple of different ways. We mentioned Fitbit in the Apple story as well in a different way. So they are the competitor for these dollars that Apple has out there. And the pitch for them is a little bit different. It's less about services and more, hey, if you want your company employees to be healthier, give them a Fitbit and that will help keep them healthy. At least that's the pitch. And you can track where they are or what they do. That's my sort of... It's interesting because Fitbit was one of those rising stars that everyone thought would be like, they're going to own this market. In fact, they already own this market. And as we've seen, the marketplace is extremely fickle, as Apple has found out with China, that things that seem to be on the trajectory don't often stay that way and you need to be flexible on your business model to adapt and to pivot where you need to. And sometimes that isn't to another consumer product but as Fitbit has found is business to business. Yeah, and I think we're going to see a lot of wearable makers try this. They may or may not be successful, but the wearable market itself has not grown at the rate that even tablets did, I don't think, certainly not that we saw phones. So it is not the next coming of smartphones, but it is a valuable marketplace. And Apple has been very good at selling its consumer watch based on some health and exercise plans. Fitbit kind of ran the exercise thing as far as they could. So they've got to try something else. In many respects, this is kind of what Detroit did with car sales, right? They did fleet sales because not enough people were buying cars but they could sell X amount of block of, like say, four tourists or whatever. And to be honest, that's the future of car sales entirely. The idea is like, individual ownership may decline a lot more in the future. But it's so advantageous. Guess what? I don't need to produce 12 different colors with custom options. I can build it to one spec for a rental car company or a company like Uber or Lyft or whatever. And I don't have to worry about just making individual models. I can save money, I can produce more and maximize the amount of productivity per worker instead of kind of having it going back and forth. Yeah. I mean, if Fitbit's doing something slightly different from Apple, it's not as much of a health involved thing. I'm sure there's some HIPAA compliance involved here but it's not providing access to your actual data, right? So it's no different than the data that you collect if you buy the Fitbit as a consumer. So a little bit easier, I guess. And still, you can get some big contracts if you get employers on board. We'll see if they do. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. Thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. It's where we get the ideas for a lot of the stuff we cover here and it's important to see what you're interested in. So the more of you that get in there and submit stories and vote on them, the better. And you can discuss with other Facebook-minded people, I mean people who are on Facebook who like the show, at facebook.com.com, slash groups, slash dailytechnewshow. All right, Nate Langston is back with the text message podcast every Sunday, coming out of the UK. And he's got a preview of what's happening on the latest text message. Nate? Thanks, guys. One of the most amazing bits of feedback I get about my podcast, text message, is that it gives North American listeners a huge amount of global context about topics they're already familiar with. This week, for example, we talked about the UK's tests of 8 gigabit per second fiber optic broadband, one of our biggest phone networks being accused of violating net neutrality laws by overly compressing streaming videos and a regulator banning hotel booking websites from pretending rooms are more popular than they are. All topics you'll know about in the US, but we can help explain how they compare this side of the pond. Do check out the latest episode 157 to hear about all those stories at techpodcast.uk. We'll also find some handy subscription links. Back to you. I really want to be one of those eight houses that has the 8 gigabit per second fiber optic lines he was talking about. You got to hear the show to find out where that is, because I don't remember it, but go check it out, techpodcast.uk. I want that. I would so want that. But it would need to be reliable. Like, it'd be great to have 8 gigabits per second, but it's only up for like half the week and the other time it's down for maintenance. Is it gigabytes or gigabits? I thought it was 8 gigabits per second. If it was gigabits, I should say. I think it's the speed, not the amount of the download. All right. Let's check out the mail bag. Andy Beach sent us a note in Slack, an interesting aside to the conversation about Fortnite from last week. Andy says, Scott has mentioned it was where kids now gather to talk, meaning Fortnite. I experienced this recently with my daughter who's now eight and in second grade. She and her friends love a game called Roblox, R-O-B-L-O-X. It's somewhere between Minecraft and Fortnite. And I found out that she has been coming home from school. She and her friends hop on Roblox, go to the same location in the game, and help each other do their homework there. When they are done, they then plan the mini games or other adventures in the game for a while before saying goodbye. She'd been doing this for a few weeks before I caught on that this is what's happening, a funny aside to the story or confirmation that these games are, in fact, the chat rooms kids use for their daily lives. And I wrote back to Andy. I was like, I'm most impressed that she got together in a game with her friends and did her homework with them. And he wrote back and said she had been in a homework assistance thing in person, but she couldn't stick around anymore. She had to be able to come home. And this was their virtual replacement for that. So is this like Second Life for Kids or something? You know, it's funny because Roblox is very popular with my wife's nephew. And it's like the thing he and his friends all play. And it's interesting because I remember doing this back when I used to play online, there were certain people you would meet over and over again and you would just have a normal kind of casual relationship where you just talk about stuff. You would have ongoing conversations about, hey, what's going on in your life. And it was very interesting because I found it to be very much like going up, going to a bar or going, hovering out of the water cooler and you just kind of have his, excuse me, discourse. One of my favorite things about his story is that you think the first time you're reading this or hearing it, they're like, ah, I came home and found out my daughter was going into this game when as soon as she got home and meeting with her friends and you think it's going to be, so I had to tell her she had to do her homework. No, she was going into the game to do her homework. This was not get your homework done before you go into Roblox. This was going to Roblox to get help with your homework from your friends. So you are all learning more. I think that's pretty amazing. It's pretty cool. And I think before the show, during the good day in the night portion, we were talking about what the future of what would come after Facebook, right? Like what kind of, what would take the place, what would disrupt it? And it could be something like Roblox. It could be something like Fortnite where people are now engaging, connecting via an interactive experience instead of something that just amounts to a digital yearbook. Yeah, I could see that because a lot of what happens is your Twitter's and your Facebook's come from folks seeing people using an existing tool in a new way, right? Twitter was essentially saying, you know, people use text messages for this. What if we created a service that was even better than using text messages for group organizations or whatever? Facebook, sort of the same way. People use online forums for X. What if we made an even better online forum, right? It's not that they were entirely new, but they found a new spin based on how people were using existing tools. So maybe there's something there. Maybe that next big startup idea comes from somebody realizing, hey, if kids are meeting up in games, what if we made a game that did this better for kids? I don't know. Local buddy. Local buddy. You got to listen to Good Day Internet. By the way, if you don't know, we have an entire show wrapped around Daily Tech News show called Good Day Internet. If you like to hear Roger and Sarah and I talk about stuff, we range beyond just the topics of conversation on the tech news. Sometimes we'll explore them in depth. Sometimes we'll talk about food or pop culture. It's called Good Day Internet and it is available exclusively as a perk for patrons at any level. You get an RSS feed for Good Day Internet and you can listen to it or you can become a patron and just listen to the DTNS. They're both options available at patreon.com slash DTNS. Also, I don't have it with me today because I was actually wearing it outside earlier because it was a little chilly and this is warm, but there is a Daily Tech News show, beanie slash stocking cap slash toque. Whatever you call it, the warm knit thing that you put on your head in the winter available in the Daily Tech News show store. I was walking around the other day and some guy yelled at me from his truck. I don't know if he was yelling, hey, love DTNS or if he was confused, but he gave me a thumbs up so it was positive. I don't know, your mileage may vary, but it will keep you warm. I can say it's a very comfortable hat. You can find it at dailytechnewshow.com slash store. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com We're live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern 2130 UTC. You can find out more about that at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Sarah Lane and Patrick Beja. See you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. And if you do order one of those hats, tell me what you call it. A head sock. I used to call them head socks. Head sock. We used to call them, I think we just called them stocking caps when I was growing up. Like when I think of stocking caps, I think like the Christmas ones, the elves wear that are pointed. That are real long, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. These are very short stockings. These are crew socks caps. Crew socks. Oh, yeah. So what do we got for names? Let's go to showbot.chatrealm.net. If you watch this live on the YouTubes or listen in the Discord, by the way, you can hook up your Discord through Patreon. Listen live on the Good Day Internet channel. You can go to showbot.chatrealm.net and vote. The headlines are submitted through IRC, through IRC.chatrealm.net. And right now, we've got $300 million and $0.10 Reddit investment. That's pretty funny. That's pretty funny. Good job, Bojan. Apple pairs with veterans. Nice. That's a good one. Zoe brings bacon. Out of lane. We are out of lane today. We miss her. $0.10, but it'll cost you. That's funny. India is trying to get Jack in the box. Get it? The testimony box. Jack Dorsey. VA is AppleCare. That's not bad. AI raising ethical human standards. Ironic. Cell phone saturation. Wires and ice cubes. Fitbit inspires corporate health. More ApplePie is healthy. Don't know that that really fits where you were going, but I totally support the sentiment. Apple pairs with veterans the most. What about you, Roger? Let me see. What was it? Is a Fitbit for your employees? Like, it's a good fit for your employees. Is a Fitbit for your employees? See, that one didn't work for me as well. All right. All right. I had to work too hard to understand it. Apple pairs with veterans, it is. All right. Apple pairs with veterans. Veteran's Day. I was about to, and I will put this online, one of the doc so that you have it. I was about to start explaining Good Day Internet again, and then I realized the only people hearing this are people who already know what Good Day Internet is because they're listening to it. Oh, man. What you might not know if you're a patron is at the associate producer level, you get the editor's desk. And Friday, I had my first guest on the editor's desk. The editor's desk is usually just me talking about why we picked things, why we did things the way we did them. And so Friday, I brought on Justin Robert Young, partially because I wanted to talk about why we decided to cover the Bezos story. Some of you still disagree with us covering it, and that's fair. But I wanted to explain where my thought process is worse, so you at least know this wasn't just a random reason. But I also brought Justin on, partly because he's good at understanding these journalistic choices as well. He also went to journalism school like I did, but also because I really just wanted to get his take on some of the non-tech aspects of it, some of the wider political aspects that we didn't touch on in the main show. So yeah, you always get a little extra at patreon.com slash DTNS. Yeah, and Len, Zoe Brings-Bacon mentions, Len has had a ton of good reaction to his artwork. It was picked up by an editorial cartoon newsletter. He has taken up the idea of sending a copy to Jeff Bezos. If you haven't seen the art from Friday, go to lemperaltestore.com to take a look. It is safe for work. Most, it is. It's totally safe for work. It's funny though. And yeah, we'll see if he gets any response. My guess is he won't get any response, but you never know. You never know. I think it's worth doing. Ace said, I went to journalism school and hated it. That's why I went into fiction. Yeah, it's funny. I went to journalism school and kind of assumed I wouldn't use it because I was like, I don't want to work at a newspaper. I kind of don't want. I worked at a radio station and I was kind of like, I'm not sure I want to work at a radio station. I don't necessarily want to work at it. And the internet came along and suddenly I was like, oh, I want to do that. And I'm actually using my journalism degree to do it. It was unanticipated. So you never know. You never know when something comes along and you just end up using it anyway. Life is like a box of chocolates. Life is what happens when you're making other plans. That's why I never make plans. That way I'll live forever. I want to know how many different life metaphors, similarly, aphorisms there are. Aphorisms. You mentioned several different categories of things just now that don't all relate to each other. So how many life aphorisms? Like a box of chocolates. Although life is like a box of chocolates, I guess is both an aphorism and a simile. That's a good point. Well, with Sarah gone, I feel like we have a little opportunity here on Good Day Internet to play a little question game. So if you are in the Discord, shoot some questions my way in the general channel. And we will do our best to answer them. You can also do it in IRC, irc.chatrealm.net. Don't do it if we're not live. Well, I mean, you can go ahead and do it if we're not live. We just won't answer them right now. But yeah, we'll do a little impromptu AMA. Roger and I both. Roger, of course, will be publishing the show as we go. But I will make sure to do as much as I can. Old guy wants to know, where does the white go when snow melts? Because the water isn't white anymore. It goes back into space. Isn't the white just the function of the crystal? Oh, I guess no, you're right. The white would go into the earth. Because the white is the refracted colors of the ice crystals. And when the ice crystals are melted, then the water no longer refracts as much. It doesn't reflect, I should say, not refract. It does refract. It doesn't reflect. And the white, which is caused by a combination of multiple colors, then just passes on through. And goes into it. It doesn't reflect. So it goes through the water into whatever it hits next. I mean, technically it doesn't go anywhere. You just don't see it anywhere. Old guy says, I like to think it goes back to the clouds. Zoe Briggs Bacon wants to know, for each of us, what's your favorite kitchen gadget? Like the one thing I couldn't live, I wouldn't eat in the kitchen. She says, what's your favorite kitchen gadget? Does it have to be a gadget or could it be a utensil? And I don't mean like a fork or a knife. Well, yeah, I was wondering that too, because my first gut reaction is the garlic press I have, because it's perfect. It's all stainless steel. It presses garlic wonderfully. It's easy to clean, but it's not necessarily a gadget. So I don't know if that fits the profile here. So he does say garlic press is acceptable, so a utensil could work. Because I like my tongs when I cook. Yeah, do you have a good, what are they made of? They're just stainless steel tongs. I mean, it's like... They're just solid tongs, huh? Yeah, I mean like... What kind of tongs are they? What brand? I don't know. We just got them at a restaurant supply store. I'm sure there's a name engraved or etched somewhere on the base, but we just paid like 10 bucks or something. Matuba wants to know if we did a story on Lowe's killing their Iris smart systems. I may have missed it. No, we didn't. Didn't show up on the feeds. Wasn't, wasn't buzzy enough. Fork would be too basic. But tongs, tongs I think are okay. Because if they're spring loaded and, you know... And Tim wants to know what food qualifies as a gadget, because somebody said we were talking about food. Is there a food, is there good food that qualifies as a gadget? Like, is that toast with the circuit board made of Vegemite? That's a gadget. Matubus and just pizza rolls might be considered a gadget. But something you can eat that can also fulfill another baguette? You can hit someone with it if it's ill enough. Now, DRNXN said something in the Discord, but didn't include a link. So I'm checking to find out if I can see anything about it. If you do see something that catches your eye, because news breaks all the time that we didn't talk about in the show, and you want us to mention it in the post-show, by all means do include a link so we can make sure that we're verifying. That's just what we do. It's not that we don't trust you. We just, we trust but verify. Thank you. There we go, CNBC. That's exactly what I wanted. DRNXN, you're the best. So CNBC says Amazon is acquiring ERO. ERO is actually what I use in my house. It's one of those mesh Wi-Fi routers. Amazon said it has acquired ERO, and it will, of course, compete with Google. And they say Apple's airport, but they discontinued that last year. And CNBC says they discontinued it. We are incredibly impressed with the ERO team and how quickly they invented a Wi-Fi solution. Amazon is focusing its smart home efforts on the Echo and is willing to acquire where it makes sense. Yeah, all right, not much else to say on that, but makes perfect sense for Amazon to acquire ERO. It probably makes sense for ERO to sell to Amazon. We don't know how much the sale is for. There's no amount quoted here, but ERO probably wasn't going to become a big company yet. If they don't want to wait 10 years to evolve and try to become something that's more than just a router maker, then selling to an Amazon is probably a good exit for the founders. I bought the ERO off of Kickstarter several years ago. ERO was founded in 2014, and the startup laid off a fifth of its employees last year. So that may be part of it, too. Maybe they were running into cash flow issues, and it was a, can we get another round of venture funding or should we just sell to Amazon? Because Amazon doesn't care if this is even a loss leader, as long as it's good technology, and it is good technology. I don't love the idea of more consolidation. I'm not going to lie. I use the Amazon Echo, but I like that ERO was a thing that was independent, and I didn't even pay for their cloud service because I'm like, yeah, I don't need anybody else having access to my data more so than they need to, because they have a cloud service that'll do some virus protection and stuff like that, and feel like that was absolutely necessary. I can protect my network in other ways. So Amazon is now going to do that, which could make the product better by providing some Amazon Web Services. Maybe that cloud service is bundled in with Prime or included in some other service like that. Tim wants to know if anyone's excited about the new Twilight Zone. I'm hopeful. I want to see it, but I'm not doing handstands. I'm not doing handstands either, but I'm pretty excited. I will say I'm pretty excited. I am a big fan of Jordan Peele. I think he's the right guy for the job. I love the original Twilight Zone. I love that they're at least keeping the trappings, like the music and the logo. And the door. He feels like he has veneration for the concept. So I am very optimistic. As long as they don't do what they did with that reboot, they did in the late 80s, where the production was done in Canada, but the stories were a little more hopeful at the end, instead of being a strength type like that. Oh, no. Yeah, we're in a 70s era right now. We're not in an 80s type era. So I don't think these will be hopeful stories. But you know what I mean, like there's that. Yeah, but that's what I'm saying. Like in the 80s, everybody wanted good news. Let's have good news again. Let's be positive. That's not the culture we're in right now. People want black mirror. They want dark stuff. So hopefully that won't be a big deal. Zoey Brings Bacon says, do people actually buy internet-connected fridges? Are they actually a good idea or more of a gimmick? I have not yet seen an internet-connected fridge that I felt was necessary yet. I personally, outside of DTNS, would recommend against buying one for now. You would recommend to buy one inside of DTNS? No, I recommend you would not. You said outside of DTNS you would recommend you not, but I was wondering if inside of DTNS you would change that. My whole thing about white goods, basically any kind of large appliance, refrigerator, washer, dryer, stove, the less complicated it is, generally the better it is in terms of longevity and maintenance. I don't mind it having some connectivity. I think that could be perfectly fine. I don't think that the fridge needs to do much. Some connectivity and some sensors might be a good idea someday. I still haven't seen a compelling reason for it. The only thing I've seen that has been in any way appealing to me is the cameras that they put in some of them where you can see what's in the fridge and even some of them claim to be able to tell you expiration dates without having to open it. I can see that maybe being useful, but it's probably not even as useful as it seems because how hard is it really to just open the fridge and look? And I say that not because I'm a big believer in how hard is it builds up to where it's like, hey, things that save me a small amount of time can build up to save me a lot of it in time. But how hard is it to open the fridge versus opening an app and looking at it? You know what I mean? Like, it probably doesn't save you that much time, really, in the long run. Longer run, longer run. I don't know. I could be wrong. One of these days. Maybe some of those days. But we need to say goodbye to the viewers on YouTube. Thank you, video viewers, YouTuber or otherwise. Thanks for being with us. That's it for today's show, except if you're on audio, stick around. There's more to come.